Daily Archives: March 25, 2007

… Saturday was meant for college football — or so it seemed. Those days are being challenged by move to play college games on weekday nights.
We’ve seen a number of games played on Thursday nights in recent years. A few schools are even playing on Friday nights. Now, the move is to Tuesday, something only typically seen during the bowl season.
And, in my opinion, it’s a bad idea.
Central Michigan and Western Michigan are scheduled to play their annual game in 2007 on Tuesday, Nov. 6 in Kalamazoo. A Tuesday night? Yes, that’s right.

What used to be a great Saturday afternoon of football between CMU and WMU is now going to be a great Tuesday night of college football. That doesn’t even sound right, does it?

One guess as to the moving force:

… The game is going to be played on Tuesday night because — drum roll, please — it’s going to be aired on ESPN2. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. TV dictates what happens in college football (the big money-maker for athletics’ programs), and for schools like WMU and CMU, they’re doing this for the paycheck and college football’s most overused term “exposure.”

From an otherwise bland interview in today’s Post and Courier (Charleston) comes this:

What side of the BCS/playoff debate are you on?

”If you want to name a true national champion, you have to have a playoff. But is that in the best interest of college football?

I’m not so sure.”

What’s right with the current system?

”It still gets an awful lot of teams involved. Even though there’s a lot of bowl games, it gets a lot of teams and players in­volved.

We have the best regular season of any sport in the world because any game can literally cost you a national champion­ship. The regular season game between Southern Cal and Notre Dame a couple of years ago – that was exciting and it meant a lot. But if there’s a playoff system, at the end of the game, the players walk off the field thinking all right, we’ll see you again down the road. It would diminish the importance of each game.”